T-Hrvatski Telekom (Zagreb, Croatia), the Croatian operator controlled by Germany’s Deutsche Telekom (Bonn, Germany), has already applied for a new 4G license just days after the country’s regulator invited bids.

Hakom is to award three blocks of 2x10MHz spectrum in the 800MHz band for use with new 4G services, although no operator will be allowed to own more than one spectrum block.

Bidders will have until October 15 to submit their applications for a 12-year license, making T-Hrvatski look very eager indeed.

Telenor’s chief executive says he is in talks with several potential new partners in India, according to Reuters.

“There are talks in many directions, I can assure you, and many who wish to speak to us as well,” Jon Fredrik Baksaas told Reuters at the operator’s capital markets event.

“There is not really anything concrete to say about this yet, but … we wish to go further in India provided that the framework at last will be in place, and that we also can see a profitability developing on a new investment in India,” he is reported to have said.

EBay Inc (San Jose, USA) Chief Executive John Donahoe often quotes a merchant saying NFC stands for "Not For Commerce" - and dismisses the prospects of Near Field Communication technology used to turn cellphones into mobile wallets.

He got some support this week from Apple Inc (Cupertino, USA), which did not embed NFC chips into the iPhone 5.

An M2M-enabled waste-management scheme involving Vodafone (Newbury, UK) is helping local councils in the Netherlands to slash their carbon emissions by up to a fifth and save thousands of euros in collection costs.

Working with Mic-O-Data (Hassinkweg, the Netherlands), a Dutch waste-management company that claims a 30% share of the market, Vodafone has fitted 6,000 ‘connected’ bins with SIM cards that transmit regular updates, notifying refuse collectors when bins are filling up or if they have not been properly closed.

Rogers Wireless (Toronto, Canada) has announced the opening of a new innovation center in Vancouver aimed at promoting the development of M2M technologies and applications.

Located in the Wavefront national center of excellence for wireless commercialization, the Rogers Wireless Innovation Center will allow business customers and developers to try out the latest M2M technology and enterprise mobility applications.

Tata Motors (Mumbai, India) has launched a new fleet telematics service it claims will help commercial vehicle fleet owners boost their productivity and profitability.

Branded Tata FleetMan, the service will initially be introduced on new tractor-trailers but is set to become available on Tata’s entire medium-sized and heavy commercial vehicle range in the coming months.

Tata says the service will be extended to existing vehicles through aftermarket fitments.

Isis, a venture of three big U.S. mobile providers, is delaying the launch of its mobile payments service for the second time this year, an executive for the company said on Thursday.

Isis is an effort by Verizon Wireless (New York, USA), AT&T Inc (Dallas, USA) and T-Mobile USA (Bellevue, USA) to provide mobile wallet services that would allow consumers to get rid of plastic cards and instead make payments by simply waving their phone at a check-out terminal.

While Japan has had mobile payment services for years, U.S. development of such services has been much slower.

Ford (Dearborn, USA) has become the first car maker to make Telenav’s (Sunnyvale, USA) Scout application available in its vehicles.

The navigation app has previously been available to users of iPhones and devices powered by Google’s Android operating system, but it can now be installed in Ford vehicles through the manufacturer’s SYNC AppLink technology.

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